


This Fated Destiny

by Zagzagael



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-19 02:09:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7340356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>!!!SPOILERS THROUGH THE FINALE!!!</p><p>Vanessa at the beginning of the ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Fated Destiny

There is only darkness now. The recollection of how one can become momentarily dazzled by sunlight something vague and nearly forgotten. She knows that world has ended. Still there is a memory; rendered unseeing with flashes of yellow and white gold, blinking as the wide world exploded into fragments as sharp as glass until finally shape became form and form became distinct and everything brighter than before. She remembers that. If she tries. She doesn’t try anymore. She wants only to see her Lord, but he has become lost to her. Or she is lost to him. Where once there was the promise of light in the elusive outline of her god, now the dark is so pervasive, so complete, so filled with the broken creatures that she can no longer conceive of wholeness, lightness, and warmth. She has left the experience of living behind for this dead existence.

Memories are dust she wipes from her feet. He washes her feet now, she’s told him they are too dirty to enter the shrine he has created for her, built for her, ensconced her within. 

She is the porcelain queen in the palo santo wooden shrine. Her arms and hands hang limp, she has lost the strength to fold her hands in prayer. The soles of her feet are clean, she is filthy. Her hair, her flesh, her wounds. Beneath the morning coat and trousers, he is unclean, too.

She is broken, but not yet into pieces. She begs him to snap her neck. He demurs, licking at her tears, kissing the corners of her mouth, stroking the long taut edges of her throat, going down on his knees in front of her, burying his face in the juncture of her thighs, letting her feel the fang and the claw through the fabric of her bridal gown. 

He is a lord, of kinds, in the forever night and he masters over her in ways he swore he never would but she forgives him his trespasses. On her body, her mind, her heart. He leaves her in candle-lit rooms to contemplate the questions his body asks of her body, the riotous groupings of waxed pillars intended to guide her out and into the forever night, a path winding towards his dark breast. 

He wants her soul; she knows this in the way she once knew her prayers. By heart. She refuses to remember those whispered words either. She swallows them down and feels as they gnaw through the viscera of her body, the parasites from a meal eaten long, long ago. She is starving. He feeds her and when he leaves she stumbles to the balcony and vomits over the edge, listening to the frantic scuttling of her children below as they slurp and swallow this sustenance. She retches until she is bent and dry-heaving, wiping at her lips with the back of her hand.

He knows of her sickness but does not mention it. She wants to fight with him, to dare him to her destruction. She has forgotten that once she hunted him, too. 

I have offered you dominion - he tells her. Again and again. Over and over. The words make no sense to her.

Dominion? - she asks stupidly. She feels the blade of her dangerous intellect dulled and useless. 

Over all the broken and shunned creatures – he says angrily, frustrated with her. - Rise up and rule beside me. Be my bride, be their mother - he urges her through gritted teeth. 

She shakes her head and he pulls her fast against him, pressing her ear to the place where there is no sound of life, before leaving her alone. He is still in the guise of the sweet doctor, Dr. Sweet. She grimaces when she looks at him, squinting through eyelashes caked with regrets. Show me your true self - she cajoles and he smiles and she sees the predator, the spider, the monstrous thing she has allowed to touch her body, sup on her hearts blood. 

She knows one thing only; the way is wholly lost. Her tongue swollen, her hands and feet twisted backwards, her spirit tattered, she is losing a battle but the war, the war is still worth fighting.

There is a crown of black widow spiders, a necklace with a writhing scorpion pendant, a gown of flayed human skin, and a throne of bone. She has refused it all. 

What has happened to me - she demands. 

Nothing has happened to you, darling. You happened - he spreads his hand wide showing her their domain; the world, the night, its creatures - to us.

She is the somnolent specter, haunting her own body. She cannot leave the confines of bone and flesh. The blood belongs to him. The phantasm dreamer, she sleepwalks through the nightmare. 

He makes the mistake of boasting of his insult. He takes her with him, back to the London manse, to show her the dead wolf strung up above the bed she once slept in, its throat torn, a pool of blood as wide as the ocean spread on the floor she once kneeled and prayed upon. A message - he tells her smugly - for the one who left you. You have been vindicated. This is my healing of your broken heart.

In the way he opened the neck of the hapless night creature and let it bleed out into her old life, the dragon opens a wound inside of her mind. Where was the Wolf of God now? His only purpose to protect her. She needs that fealty more than ever. His true purpose suddenly clear to her. 

Inside her chamber, she closes her eyes and feels sleep tug her through the ether, into the dream of another. Hurry - she whispers - before it’s too late. 

Too late for what, she wonders, when she recognizes the sound of his boots approaching from behind. It had always been too late.


End file.
